Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
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ANDY Massey smiles as he recalls his first game as Liverpool’s chief doctor – a proverbial baptism of fire involving Steven Gerrard and his lacerated tackle.
The legendary former Reds captain goes into great detail in his autobiography about the incident in an FA Cup tie against Bournemouth back in 2014, but we’ll spare the details in the interest of taste here, save to say it was a fairly gruesome injury requiring a delicate touch around a sensitive area.
Bangor man Massey, just recently promoted from academy doctor to the firsts having worked previously with the Belfast
Giants and then the Irish
FA, could scarcely have asked for a more challenging introduction to his new post.
And that wasn’t the sum of it either, with centre-back
Martin Skrtel sliced open during the same game, sustaining a nasty gash to his head.
Professional clubs can go months, sometimes a full season even, without encountering these kinds of gory war wounds.
But here was Massey being called into action twice on his senior debut, thrust into the spotlight in front of the rolling Sky Sports cameras, his surgical skills under scrutiny as he set about stitching up two bloodied superstars.
“Yes, Steven detailed that very precisely in his book,” laughed Massey.
“But what I never told him was that during the procedure I was just thinking… at no point in my medical training have I been told how to do this.
“During that same game I also had to put five staples into a head wound on Martin Skrtel.
“I remember immediately after the game looking at my phone and I had a load of messages saying, ‘Did you just staple someone’s head on live TV?’
“Apparently the TV cameras had cut to Martin and me just as I was doing it and the commentator apologised on air, saying, ‘That’s not what you want to see when you are eating your Sunday dinner’.
“So cheers Martin Tyler! That was all OK until we were walking out to the bus and Skrtel was being interviewed.
“The reporter said, ‘You were so brave letting the doctor do that’, and he replied, ‘I wouldn’t have if I knew how f***ing sore it would be.’”
Thankfully, that would be Massey’s most dramatic afternoon working for Liverpool, a seven-year love affair which came to an end last month when he left Merseyside for Zurich after being headhunted by FIFA.
But he leaves with praise ringing in his ears. Gerrard’s successor as club captain Jordan Henderson paid tribute to the “popular, trusted and respected” Massey in his programme notes for Saturday’s game against Bournemouth, while he himself admits he was moved by the last conversation he had with
Jurgen Klopp just a few days ago.
“I have made a lot of friends [at Liverpool], players and staff who you see one day and the next they have left the club, unfortunately that’s part of football,” he said.
“I guess the proudest part was when the players and manager said thank you just before I left – I guess I was doing an OK job.
“Jurgen (below) is an amazing character and I will cherish what he told me just before my last match for Liverpool. “I had a great relationship with him and this was genuinely why deciding to leave Liverpool was so difficult.” Despite his modesty, Massey can be proud of his work there. The stats show the incidence of injuries reduced dramatically during his time as head of medicine, all the more impressive when you consider the Premiership champions-elect play with an intensity few other teams on the planet can match.
But Massey is too self-effacing to take any credit, insisting he’s “not important enough” to have left a legacy.
“I’m just proud of lasting so long in a job like this,” he said.
“It is a seven days a week, 365 days a year job in an industry that has very little security, and to be honest, I never thought I would be leaving on my own terms.”
Henderson touched on it in his programme notes – the word “trust” – and for Massey, that goes to the very heart of his job.
He feels it’s important to know your place when you work in elite level
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“We see the players every day and you become good friends with a lot of them. But first and foremost I was their doctor, so I never wanted them to think I was a fan,” he said.
“I wanted them to trust me and I don’t think they will do that if they suspect you only want to hang around with them because they are footballers. I had a policy whereby everyone was treated equally, so I wouldn’t kick a youth team player out of the office because one of the star players wanted to talk to me.
“You see it so often in football that staff buddy up with the top players to secure their position in the club, but I just think it decreases your credibility. The environment is very much like every changing room I have been in.
“There are the jokers and the vocal players, mixed up with the quieter ones.
“You definitely need to be suited to working in a team environment to survive in football.
“You need a thick skin to deal with the banter, you need to be compassionate to deal with giving players bad news, you need to be analytical to dissect your injury plans and you need to be reflective to look at what has gone well or what has gone badly.
“It is, was very enjoyable. I got to work with a few of the best – two of the best managers in the world [Klopp and Brendan Rodgers], some of the best players in the world, some of the best young players ever produced by the club, one of the best